Jabalpur: Another instance of statue vandalism or defacing has cropped up. This time from Madhya Pradesh’s Jabalpur. A white statue of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was smeared with red colour on Friday morning.

Taking note of the offence, local administration and police have initiated the preliminary investigation.

Several incidents of statue vandalism has been reported from various parts of the country in the last one week.

Two statues of Vladimir Lenin was demolished by a mob in Tripura last week – one razed by mob, another at Sabroom Motor Stand in Agartala and another by a bulldozer at Belonia College Square in a Tripura town.

On Friday, BJP leader Ram Madhav said that the statue of Lenin here was not vandalised but removed by people who had placed it. m. “No statue has been broken in Tripura. This is false information. Some people had put a statue on a private land and then removed it. It is not vandalism,” he was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.

Following the vandalism of the idols of Communist icon, a statue of Dravidian ideologue ‘Periyar’ EV Ramasamy was damaged in Tirupattur in Tamil Nadu. This was followed by defacing statues of Bharatiya Jan Sangh founder Syama Prasad Mukherjee in Jadavpur University in West Bengal, Dr BR Ambedkar in Meerut in Uttar Pradesh and Mahatma Gandhi in Taliparamba in Kannur district of Kerala was defaced.